Philip F. Gura is one of America’s leading historians, a prolific scholar who has dealt with a wide variety of subjects, from the twang of banjos to the angry God of Jonathan Edwards. His research and writing on the American Transcendentalists—a “club of the like-minded,” as one of them put it, that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau—spans over two decades. If such writers and their ideas are to be trusted to the hands of the historian, surely Professor Gura would be that historian.
The potential problem, however, as Gura acknowledges at the outset, is that Transcendentalism, one of our nation’s most influential, most notoriously diffuse and least understood intellectual movements, resists the positive identification and earnest categorization on which much historical research rests. An epigraph at the very beginning of the book (taken from Orestes Brownson, an important participant in Transcendentalism who later became a Catholic) suggests that historians will have their hands full with the Transcendentalists: “No single term can describe them. Nothing can be more unjust to them, or more likely to mislead the public, than to lump them all together….” Because it comprised diverse interests and manifested itself in myriad ways, American Transcendentalism has been defined variously as a philosophy, a religion, a politics and a type of literature. The differences among practitioners, the several “varieties of Transcendentalism,” the equally diverse character of its influences on American culture and the fact that scholars do not agree on the extent of the movement’s duration—all these traits make it a squirmy subject when asked to pose for a portrait.
One of the dangers of the historical treatment of a vital, definition-resistant, multiform intellectual movement that unfolds over time is that such a history might result in a mere butterfly collection or museum exhibit. If the historian removes the object of study from nature, if the object is dried out and preserved for the sake of academic study, we consequently may be afforded a stable perspective from which to view the now-stationary object—but the object is dead, a mere lifeless curiosity.
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